Why Live? Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction || Listening to History: Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Live Music

Listening to History: Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Live MusicAuthor(s): Jon RoseSource: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 18, Why Live? Performance in the Age of DigitalReproduction (2008), pp. 9-16Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25578109 .

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Listening to History: Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Live Music

Jon Rose

ABSTRACT

I he author explores the

vibrant, but often hidden, unorthodox musical culture

of Australia, recounting little

known movements, events,

dates, personalities and

Aboriginal traditions. He urges the listener to investigate and

value this unique and fecund

musical history, and in so doing, find models that are relevant

to solving the dilemmas of a

declining contemporary music

practice. Live music encourages direct interconnectivity among

people and with the physical world upon which we rely for our existence; music can be life

supporting, and in some situa

tions, as important as life itself.

While there is much to learn

from the past, digital technology can be utilized as an interface

establishing a tactile praxis and

enabling musical expression that promotes original content, social connection and environ

mental context.

m Jast year at a Sydney university, a musicologist

observed, "Everybody knows that music in Australia didn't re

ally get going until the mid-1960s." Significantly, this gem was

spoken at a seminar that featured a film about the Ntaria Ab

original Ladies' Choir from Hermannsburg, Central Australia

(Fig. 1). The denial of a vibrant and significant musical history in white as well as indigenous culture has done this country a

great disservice.

It may well be the prime reason why none of the 20th cen

tury's great musical forms ever originated in Australia. Bebop, western swing, Cajun, tango, and samba (to name but a few)

originated in lands also saddled with a colonial history. A tiny

country like Jamaica has given birth to no less than calypso,

ska, and reggae.

Jon Rose (composer, musician, instrument-maker). E-mail: <[email protected]>. Web site: <www.jonroseweb.com>.

This article is based on extracts from The Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address given 3 December 2007 in Sydney by Jon Rose under the auspices of The New Music Network.

See <mitpressjournals.org/lmj> for supplemental materials related to this article.

To many living in our current

cut-and-paste paradise, this prob

ably seems irrelevant, even an irrita

tion?why bother with the detailed

sonic interconnectivity of the past when you can avoid both past and

present by logging into, say, Sec

ond Life? I didn't add 'future' to

the list of avoidances, because you can guarantee that the future will

be mostly a rehash of the past. It's

what we already have in Australia?

everything from faithful copies of

European Baroque to yet more hip

hop to concerts where almost any plink or

plonk from the 20th

century is attributed to John Cage. Unless we investigate and value our own extraordinary musi

cal culture, the dreaded cultural cringe will continue to define

what constitutes the practice of music on this continent.

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?2007 Jon Rose LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 18, pp. 9-16, 2008 9



I want to describe a story of music,

sometimes positive, often wayward, al

ways interesting, which could point to a

productive future.

So first, to History. It didn't start off

so badly, as Inga Clendinnen recalls in

her book Dancing with Strangers. The

firsthand account of Lieutenant William

Bradley states that "the people mixed

with ours and all hands danced together"

[1]. Other dance events followed. Musi

cal gestures of friendship also took place. The British started to sing. The Aborigi nal women in their bark canoes "either

sung one of their songs, or imitated [the

sailors], in which they succeeded beyond

conception" [2]. Some tunes whistled

or sung by the British became favourite

items with the expanding indigenous rep ertoire of borrowed songs. Right there at

the start, we have a cultural give and take

from both sides.

In the late 18th century dancing and

music, and you couldn't really have one

without the other, offered significant levels of communication between indig enous

people and the invaders. Dancing was necessary before any exchange of

gifts or getting down to the business of

the day?which was not always how do

we steal your land without you getting violent. Aboriginal mimicry (and gen eral piss-taking) of the soldiers parading,

bowing, and bellowing at each other was

a method of comprehension, a way of

accepting strange behaviour. Dance and

music were the live commentary, the lit

eral embodiment of the story. Records

recall that Aboriginal peoples were, up to the destruction of their traditional

way of life, the masters of tactile learning and the oral transmission of all cultural

knowledge. This early window of cultural opportu

nity vanished, of course, when Australia

stopped being perceived as a jail and be

came instead a place of plunder. But this

didn't mean that music as a prime tool

of communication became redundant.

On the contrary, just about all aspects of colonial life are embedded in the mu

sical record if you care to look. It's not

easy since, until very recently, few histo

rians ever took the place seriously. From

the indigenous point of view, there may

be images of whitefella's boats in rock

art, but we'll never know what songs were dreamed about the invaders?af

ter initially trying to ignore the crazed

strangers, you may be sure that such a

catastrophe quickly became part of the

oral record?read Allan Marett's Songs,

Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North

Australia if you doubt me [3]. Contempo

rary events are still subject matter for the

comparatively few remaining traditional

song dreamers.

There is a unique recording made in

1899 of Tasmanian Aboriginal Fanny Cochrane singing into an Edison phono

graph machine. The photo is stunning too (both are held at the State Library

of Tasmania). But that is all there is un

til A.R Elkin's first recording in 1949, as

far as I can ascertain. Audio recordings thereafter document almost exclusively the music practice in Arnhem Land.

Along with hundreds of languages, we

have rubbed out thousands, if not tens

of thousands, of ancient ceremonial and

everyday practical songs without a trace.

That recording of Fanny Cochrane is

arguably one of the most important 19th

century musical artefacts from anywhere in the world?certainly

more important

than the recording of Brahms playing his

piano in the same year. With Johannes we still have the notation; without Fan

ny's voice there would be nothing. And

maybe that's what we have wanted, "noth

ing" to connect us to the horrors of Tas

manian history. "An impossible past superimposed

on

an unlikely present suggesting an improb able future" [4]. Here Wayne Grady, in

his book The Bone Museum, is describing the nature of the palaeontologic record,

but he could be describing the culture

of the modern Australian state. I find it a

useful key. Let's unlock some other musi

cal history that has been documented.

We know that the first piano arrived on

board the ship Sirius with the first fleet.

It was owned by the surgeon George Wo

gan. What happened to it is not known,

but we do know that the import of pianos

by the beginning of the 20th century had

grown from a nervous trickle to a barely controllable flood. The famous statement

by Oscar Commetant that Australians

had already imported 700,000 pianos by 1888 may be unsubstantiated [5], but the

notion of one piano for every three or

four Australians by the beginning of the

20th century could well be close to the

mark. Here are some statistics just from

the port of Melbourne for that year: im

ported: 3,173 upright pianos; 1,247 or

gans. But then by 1909, Australia-wide

it is 10,432 imported pianos; by 1910, 13,912 pianos; by 1911, 19,508 pianos; and by 1912, 20,856 pianos.

That's 64,708 imported pianos in just 4

years. The figures come from the "Musi

cal Opinion and Musical Trade Review,"

November 1914. (I'm grateful to Alison

Rabinovici for these statistics.)

Whichever way you estimate, there

were hundreds of thousands of "Joan nas" in Australia by the time of the 1930s

Great Depression. These pianos didn't

just stay in the capital cities. Dragged by bullock dray, lumped on the back of cam

els, these instruments ended up all over

the country (Fig. 2).

Let's look at how and what they played on all these pianos.

Mr. Wallace was presented with various

pieces of music, which he played extem

poraneously [on the piano], introducing

occasionally some brilliant variations, which excited much general astonish

ment. He ended that performance with

'Currency Lasses' (as composed by our

talented towns lady, Mrs. John Paul Se

nior) adding to it some extemporane ous variations_(Sydney Gazette, March

1, 1836, p. 3) [6]

For my own part, as a keyboard player, I

had to learn quickly how to fake intro

ductions, endings, modulations; sponta

neously interpolate or leave out a section

of music; transpose on sight or by ear;

spontaneously "fill-out" or otherwise

modify a given arrangement... embel

lishing or otherwise varying each repeti tion of my solo. (St. John Caws, Goldfield

pianist, 1860s, Victoria) [7]

This empirical methodology would

sound familiar to any professional musi

cian who worked in the social and RSL

clubs of Australia one hundred years later. We'll return to the practical side of

the piano later.

A read through John Whiteoak's

groundbreaking book Playing Ad Lib

(from which those quotes were taken)

presents a strong tradition of orality, and

through observations of colonial Vaude

ville, the music hall, the silent cinema,

circus, and theatrical events, he exposes a lexicon of unorthodox music making

more akin to the 1960s avant-garde and

beyond than repressed Victorian society. If you like, the colonial 19th century was

a period of fecund instrumental tech

nique, music making without the instruc

tion manual.

Here is a description of a concert in

1918; it's Belle Sylvia and the first Austra

lian jazz band complete with Stroh (that's a violin with a horn attachment for me

chanical amplification). It's already in the

Australian tradition of mimicry, send up,

and pastiche. The performance included

farmyard and jungle effects, the playing of two cornets at the same time, thun

der, pistol shots, frenetic drumming with

kitchen utensils and grotesque vocals.

Descriptive pieces often combined famil

iar musical segments, innovative textures

and individual sound effects to repre sent a particular event in sound. Some

notable examples were performed in

the early 1860s by the violin/cello duo

Poussard and Douay. The duo interpo lated variations (sometimes improvisa tions) on popular tunes and an array of

10 Rose, Listening to History



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unorthodox instrumental techniques to create complex and lengthy musical 'de

scriptions' of events such as the Burke and Wills expedition [8].

That's also from Whiteoak's book.

So, the evidence indicates that colonial

music often pointed to the many char

acteristics of indigenous music practice, and through mimicry Aboriginal peoples rendered and made a

place for the in

vaders' music in their own repertoires; it

was a Gebrauchsmusik?a functional music

embedded with common narrative and

common frames of reference, a shared

sense of purpose?music that was prac tical and local, in which mimicry and

improvisation were the prime vehicles

of expression. Unfortunately, from the

gold rush onwards, the common purpose of the colonisers became clear. Even the

most enlightened were

engaged in the

wholesale destruction of Aboriginal cul

ture, a politico-economic agenda formu

lated by the powerful and still entering the law books via the mining industry to

this day. Even where Christianity worked a more

moralistic trail of destruction compared to the pastoralists, the practice of music

was both the medium of conquest and the

medium of survival. Whatever your view

of history, when the Hermannsburg Ab

original Women's Choir sing the chorales

of J.S. Bach in their Arrernte language,

with their own articulation, gliding porta mento, and timbre, it is an

extraordinary and unique music that is being made.

Founded by Lutheran Pastors Kemp and Schwartz in 1887, the choir's music

is full of colonial cultural contradiction, but that music has also nurtured the in

digenous population through times of

persecution and extreme physical hard

ship. The choir has gone from a 40-plus

membership in its heyday of the 1930s to the current situation, where it is dif

ficult to muster eight singers; on our way to record the choir 2 years ago, two of the

choir's ladies had died in that week. This

music could vanish in 5 years. Mixed up with government policy to

liquidate Aboriginal culture by placing mixed-blood children in institutions is

the 1935 example where Aboriginal chil dren with leprosy were "rounded up" (to

quote the local newspaper) and placed in the Derby Leprosarium in Western

Australia. An unexpected outcome of

this brutal herding was the founding of

The Bungarun Orchestra. To keep their

fingers exercised, up to 50 patients per formed Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner

by ear, copying one of the sisters at the

piano. And, according to their own tes

timony, the music helped the inmates

escape the loss of their families and tra

ditional cultural life, and also the painful

injections of chaulmoogra oil into their

bodies. Documentation of the orchestra

shows dozens of violinists, the odd gui tar, a

didgeridoo, and some four banjo

players [9]. I'm not a fan of Wagner but I would

pay big bickies to hear a recording of

Wagner with banjos. Unfortunately, the

only audio documentation seems to be

the singing of an Anglo hymn?nothing

from the classical canon.

In spite of the nuns who ran the Lep rosarium doing their very best, by 1960, 350 Aborigines had died painful deaths there from Hanson's disease. It's a shock

ing frontier story, but my point is that the

practice of music fulfilled a vital if con

tradictory role?it was part patronising western

hegemony and part a genuine

release, expression, and consolation for

those suffering. (The treatment under

this regime was harsh: they had a jail at

this Leprosarium?a fuckin'jail in a chil

dren's hospital!)

The Australian aboriginal music is beau tiful and sprightly, like the Phoenician,

whilst at times it is solemn and serious, like the Dorian. A native song of warfare,

which would scarcely sound to us as such, is liable to drive the natives frenetic and to provoke them to fight. On the con

trary, they get so touched by their mourn ful songs as to be moved to tears [10].

So wrote the inquisitive and insightful

Bishop Salvado who founded the New

Rose, Listening to History 11



Norcia Benedictine Abbey and mission in

Western Australia in 1846. The commit

ment to music from Salvado, and a hun

dred years later from Dom Moreno, both

skilled pianists and composers, is one of

the most compelling stories of interracial

music making in the history of Australia.

Despite the vicious, racist policies of the

Perth government, the Spanish sought to ameliorate the sufferings of the Nyun

gara through constant music making? and a

good Mediterranean diet. At the

beginning there was a 20-piece string

or

chestra, which by 1885 had morphed into a

25-piece brass band. The library at New

Norcia has many documents that attest to

the oral skills of the Nyungara children.

Within 9 months, they had mastered all

the instruments of the brass band and a

substantial body of the repertoire. Father

J. Flood recalls that on one occasion he

gave one of the Aboriginal kids a flute

for amusement on a 40-mile journey by horse and trap; by the end of the jour

ney, he had "mastered all the difficulties

of the instrument and could play some

tunes really well; and yet he had never

seen a flute before [11]."

Of course to an indigenous people

whose oral skills were a matter of life

and death, such a feat would have been

seen as commonplace. I'm grateful to the

library at New Norcia for this informa

tion.

Gumleaf playing may well go back

thousands of years. Again, the record is

hazy. According to musicologist Robyn

Ryan [12], it was documented first by pastoralists in 1877 in the Channel Coun

try of Western Queensland. The gum leaf was used by Aborigines in Christian

Church services by the beginning of the

20th century, and reached popularity in

the Great Depression of the 1930s when

the desperately unemployed formed

20-piece Aboriginal gumleaf bands like

Wallaga Lake, Burnt Bridge, and Lake Ty ers, and armed with a

big Kangaroo skin

bass drum, marched up and down the

eastern seaboard?demonstrating

a de

fiance in the face of the whitefella and his

economic methodology. The spirit of this

music was not to appear again before the

1970s Aboriginal cultural revival. Alas,

the gumleaf band has disappeared. What

has happened to this tradition? The Wal

laga Lake Band played for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932.

Why isn't there a 20-piece gumleaf band

marching down George street on Austra

lia day? This is the New Orleans jazz of Australia?who is looking after this, who

is nurturing this?

The music history of this country is

written with a cringing agenda and read

in a state of amnesia. Let's take a history

of a definable music; let's take electronic

music, for example. What are the guiding issues for such a

history? (1) If it's any

good, it can't have originated here, (2) No one

really likes it anyway. Now let's

re-write that.

1872. (That's where one could start.) The Telegraph line is finished linking Adelaide to Darwin, and Australia to

the rest of the world, and with it the first

transmission of electronic signals in the

southern hemisphere. The Aborigines

through whose land it passed heard

these, and they heard something else.

They called it the Singing Line due to the Aeolian effect of the wind on the sin

gle line cable. What a great inter-media

event?you got electronic music and the

invention of environmental art, about 90

years before the word was coined.

1878. The first transmission of vocal and

instrumental music from Melbourne

Town Hall to South Melbourne Council

Chambers via telephone.

Fig. 3. Roseina Boston playing gum leaf in the Jon Rose production Pannikin at The Melbourne Festival. See <www.ionroseweb com/

f_projects_pannikm.html>. (Photo ? Stephen Skok 2005) <www.jonroseweb.com/

1 ^ /tow, Listening to Histoiy



1893. Percy Grainger conceives of his

free music [13], a music of gliding tones,

which would not be realised before his

experiments of the 1950s and the inven

tions of such analogue synthesizers as the

Moog and the VCS3 in the 1960s. 1914. Audiences hear (classical and rag

time) violinist and inventor Henri Kube

lik on the vaudeville stages in Melbourne

and Sydney. "As he played the fiddle, his

'Kublophone' transmitted electronic

signals mysteriously around the audito

rium."

1922. Mr.J.W Hambly-Clark experiment

ing with radio station 5AA cut his own

Edison-type cylinders as he played violin

solos and broadcast these by placing a

telephone carbon microphone down

the throat of the long phonograph horn

speaker. (That quote courtesy of Warren

Burt.)

1932. Jack Ellit invents a musique concrete

style of collage using cinematic film stock;

this went on in the cultural isolation of

Australia 20 years before the French got hold of the idea.

1947. The Musik Maker Magazine on the

21st of the 7th states:

Glenn Marks is very busy with his pro

jected 'electronic Orchestra' with which

he hopes to startle the Sydney multitudes

shortly. The idea is that the actual instru ments of cellos, violins and piano emit no sound, but electronic devices pick up the vibrations, convey them to a central

mixing control panel, where they are

co-ordinated and blended before pass

ing on through the amplifier, thence to

multiple speakers.

1948. Australia's first solid-body electric

violin is built by Lynn Johanson for his brother Eric, who designed the electron

ics and pick-up. It uses a standard mag netic phonograph cartridge that has the

steel needle in contact with the under

neath of the bridge creating a direct

vibration pick-up rather than any sound

box and microphone. One of my favourite stories relates how

he was in a radio studio waiting to per form solo. Another band was perform

ing, and Eric was just playing around

with their tune thinking no one else

could hear him, as his violin made very little noise unamplified. However, he was

plugged into the radio station's system and the guy on the mixing board saw a

sound input and turned it up. He liked

what he heard and turned it up more,

making it a dominant sound on the per formance of the other band. Well, the sta

tion phones rang hot about how much

they liked that violin with the band. The band was furious that their playing was

overshadowed by another performer that

they never knew had been playing over

the top of them. Is that post-modernism or what?

1951. On the 8th of June, the School of

the Air was officially opened at the Royal

Flying Doctor Base. What has that got to

do with electronic music, I hear some ask?

Shortwave radio produces all the sounds

associated with analogue electronic mu

sic, white noise, ring modulation, phas

ing, delay.... You name it, it's got it. So

hundreds of outback kids grew up listen

ing to electronic music on a daily basis.

They may not have particularly appreci ated the fact that their radio sets went

brrrrzzzzaaaawwiiiaaaagegegegegege, but as Arnold Schoenberg pointed out,

"Neue Musik beim angfang ist niemals so

schoen" (New music is never very nice at

the beginning)... inferring that if it is, it's

probably not new.

1955. A Silliac computer, under the guid ance of John Bennett, head of physics,

plays music at The World Conference of

Automatic Machines, at the University of Sydney. When the computer played the university anthem as a death march,

the critic from The Age reported that it

"sounded like a refrigerator defrosting, but in tune."

This has all happened in Australia, and

we are not even up to the official begin

ning of electronic music, which many commentators put at 1958 with the pre

miere of Poeme Electronique at The Brus

sels World's Fair. Somehow, in the USA,

the Silliac type of computer technology ended up as the RCA Mark II Sound

Synthesizer at Princeton University (in

1958), utilised by such luminaries as Mil

ton Babbitt. In Australia, we had to wait

until 1999 for that machine to splutter into life again to be heard. I'll let you

figure why that should be.

1964. Audio waveforms and magnets are used by Stan Ostaja-Kotkowski and

Malcolm Kay to control the world's first

homemade video synthesizer. That is im

agery being controlled live by electronic

sound. (Thanks to Stephen Jones for that

piece of information.)

1972. Dancer Philippa Cullen, engineer

Philip Connor, and composer Greg Schiemer produced electronic music

whereby the movements of the dancer on

stage played a synthesizer controlled by

homemade Theremin technology [14].

If you think about it, sonic sensation is

only possible through movement.

1977. The world's smallest 100-watt am

plifier and multi-speaker system were

made by Don Mori in Sydney. Each unit was custom made for the customer. Disas

ter struck when the down pipe that Don

used for the casing was changed from

imperial to metric, requiring the whole

circuit board to be rebuilt. Buying a Mori

amp had certain difficulties. If you put

your amp in for repairs, there was always a good chance that on your return to pick it up, you would find that it had been sold

to some other customer in the queue.

Don's reply would be "Never mind, I'll

make you another one" or "Look, mate,

I'm not a bloody corporation."

1979. The world's first sampler is pro

duced in Sydney by Peter Vogel and Kim

Ryrie, but at $50,000 per unit, it is soon

displaced by cheaper copies, leading to

commercial death by 1986. It's about the

only digital invention whereby Australia

is known throughout the music industry. Rock stars still hoard them; it's among

the grand obsolete objects that you find

left hanging about in the corridors at the

Australian Broadcasting Corporation?

aging homeless technology. These items that I've listed are all pre

cursors to the digital age of music and

have led to such things as MIDI con

trolled instruments, interactive systems, MAX and JITTER, and the ubiquitous

iPod. Australians, you might say, moved

from being innovators to consumers.

I'm sure that do-it-yourself couple

Joanne Cannon and Stuart Favilla, who

have developed their own hybrid instru

ments, including a laser light harp and the

giant digital Serpent, without much help from anybody, should also be included

in our revised history of electronic mu

sic. My point is that you can and should

research and write your own history; if it

has content, it will ring true. It might also

provide the materials with which to chal

lenge the future. Throughout the 1980s,

Rainer Linz self-financed and published a regular NMA music journal, articles,

and books?all of which presented an al

ternative paradigm for the development of an identifiable local music. The many issues of self-reliance dealt within those

pages demonstrated a desire and passion for experimentation in the face of official

mediocrity. Decades on, they make an in

teresting read of the future.

Maybe we should look to musicians

rather than composers to take tradition

to a new level or at least radically altered

context. Instrumentalists have already done this. What is Aboriginal Australia's

greatest contribution to new (let's use

those horrible words) art music world

wide? I would argue the technique of

circular breathing and voice additives

to create multiphonics. The brass and

woodwind virtuosos who have sprung up since the 1960s would be diminished in

deed without these sonic wonders firmly

planted in their chops. Evan Parker, saxo




phone; Jim Denley, flute; Leigh Hobba, clarinet; Heinz Holliger, oboe; Vinko

Globokar, trombone; Melvyn Poore,

tuba; Conrad Bauer, trombone; Axil

Dorner, trumpet... the list must be in its

thousands by now.

Yothu Yindi may have come closest to

generating a new form or genre, mixing

trad Yolgnu songs of the Gum-atj and

Rirra-tjingu clans with balanda (white

fella) rock music, but the re-mix of their

hit record "Treaty" was formulaic dance

music complete with excruciating multi

culti video. I don't think it represents a

new form, and by now where niche mar

keting demands a new style name with

just about every released album, it prob

ably doesn't matter. Mandawuy Yunu

pingu's resulting initiative however, The

Garma Festival [15], is something to be

truly proud of and is the kind of ongoing, vital cultural event where music at least is

considered valuable.

In many ways the story of the piano in

Australia has come full circle. The first

fleet piano of George Wogan has never

been found and was probably eaten by

white ants within a few years of it being

dumped at Sydney Cove. What happened to countless other keyboard instruments

is demonstrated by what can be found

in a few private museums such as Albert

Fox's The Musical Village near Mel

bourne and Margaret McDonald's col

lection of between 400-500 keyboards at

Nowra, New South Wales.

It is also suggested by the work of Perth

piano player Ross Bolleter. Ross has be

come a specialist in performing on "the

ruined piano." These are instruments

that are prepared by the actions of an

extreme climate and/or human neglect.

So, the continent of Australia has had

its say about the piano, the climate has

simply destroyed the vast majority that

were sent here. In recent years, Ross has

started a piano sanctuary at Wambyn Ol

ive Farm, Western Austraia, where these

bastions of western culture can live out

their remaining years crumbling to the

tune of gravity and the odd cyclone com

ing in off the Indian Ocean. Bolleter's

use of history to make new and poignant music is exemplary.

Other music has arrived in the "now"

through equally compelling circum

stances. Drum and fife music was prob

ably the most utilised Gebrauchsmusik

played by the British military on arrival at

Sydney Cove, used to punctuate speeches, toasts to the King, orders, floggings, and

hangings. To say the music inhabited the

physical would be an understatement;

bloody and corporal would be a better

description. A few years ago as part of

the Australia Ad Lib [16] survey for the

ABC, I came across Chris Nightingale, alias "the whistler," playing dance music

on his tin whistle and various percus sion instruments attached to his legs at

Central Station. Chris plays whistle while

running on the spot for up to four hours

at a time. This is exhilarating music, not

to say exhausting; the flute sound is full

of overblown harmonics. One notes the

drum and bass influence on his rhythmic

patterns. This is what he said about his

demon whistle and percussion act: "The

running on the spot and the jumping

up and down causes those extra little

harmonics to pop out unexpected like,

purging my body, purging my mind. I still smoke rollies, though."

Here is a model of how an Australian

artist might live their life today. Her

name is Roseina Boston; she is a Gum

bayun-girr elder from the Nambucca

Valley. Her Aboriginal name is Wanangaa which means

"stop" because she was so

hyperactive?she still is (Fig. 3).

She was born under a lantana bush on

Stewart Island in the Nambucca Valley in

1935. Her grandfather's brother, Uncle

George Possum Davis, was well-known for

his Burnt Bridge Gumleaf Band in the 1930s. By the age of eight, Roseina had

acquired an excellent gumleaf technique. When you meet her, within minutes you

are aware of a polymath, as she recounts

the travels she has undertaken to find the

correct location of her dreamings and

shows you the paintings with which she

has documented these totemistic experi

ences, all interrupted by bursts of gum leaf playing?a rich sound with extrovert

vibrato reminiscent of the soprano saxo

phone of Sidney Bechet. Her repertoire includes the transformative technique

of birdsong mimicry, including the most

extraordinary rendition of a Kookaburra

that these ears have ever heard.

Traditional societies are loaded with

examples where the leaders had to carry

the entire cultural knowledge system

through song, dance, storytelling, and

visual manifestations. You didn't get the

gig unless you could sing, tell stories, and

dance the best. Imagine a prime minister

or president who can sing?only Hugo

Chavez of Venezuela comes to mind. Un

fortunately, we've just had 11 years of a

leader who despised just about all culture,

the arts, and education, too. Rudd (the

new prime minister) at least can dance

a bit. But these are our leaders?forget them?how could we make the practice

of music ubiquitous? And I said music,

not muzak?music as a firsthand experi

ence, something actually played new

by

people each and every time.

Can you still find live music embedded

in communal activity? Well, if you are an

atheist, the church service will have to

be ruled out. Even if you are a Catholic,

you'll have to rule the church service out

as they got rid of all the good music back in 1965 at Vatican II. I guess that leaves

shopping and, much as I loath the ac

tivity, I'm please to report that at David

Jones department store you can find an

example of functional live music that still

exists. Michael Hope is a pianist who pro vides hundreds, if not thousands, of shop

pers in their various states of depression,

loneliness, delirium, and ecstasy with

unique moments of the recognition of

their plight. Delving into a repertoire of

between three and four thousand songs, Michael's musical function expands from

the role of background music, through the role of surrealist entertainer, into

that of socialworker?keeping members

of our often dysfunctional society from

collapse.

Significantly, a few years back some

new suits in middle (meddle) manage ment thought that Michael should be

booted out and replaced with some buy,

buy, keep on buying electronic hip-hop. Michael's shopping fans responded with

a petition, he was reinstated, and he's still

there.

Imagine if every major store had live

music, or even a lunchtime concert? It's

not fantasy. In Tokyo in the 1980s, there

were concerts of new music going on in

department stores on a regular basis.

And they paid well too.

Clearly people would still shop whether there was music or not. So let's

look at some examples where music, in

traditional Aboriginal terms, is life sup

porting, or as important as life itself. Not

quite up there with the concept of "if you don't sing the universe into existence, it

doesn't exist," but close.

David Harvey is a musical savant.

He was born in 1989 with quite severe

autism. From 18 months onwards, his

mother noted that almost every action

by David was concerned with music, not

only playing and singing music but mak

ing drawings of musicians and musical

instruments, and conducting music. On

his first visit to an orchestral concert at

age 5, he jumped up onto the rostrum

and proceeded to conduct, much to the

amazement of all there. Later visits to

parks involved David finding an ersatz

rostrum and conducting trees, graves,

people?the city as his own giant musical

composition?making sense of his world

through music. I'm not suggesting that

we all go round conducting trees or traf

fic, but I find David's perception of a ho




Fig. 4. Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor bowing a fence on top of a sand dune in the Strzelecki

Desert, Australia. (Photo ? Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor 2004)

mogeneous musical environment much

more compelling than any performance I've heard at the Opera House.

Others turn physical disability into mu

sical ability: the Tasmanian guitarist Greg

Kingston, who suffers from Tourette's

Syndrome, would be an example of that.

Greg is an improvising guitarist who at

tributes his speedy and explosive style of

playing directly to Tourette's. Greg plays the music of his condition in a symbiotic

relationship. If only guitarists without

Tourette's could play with half that kind

of energy.

Multiple sclerosis sentenced John Blades to a wheelchair, where no doubt it

was expected that he would spiral slowly out of view. The contrary happened and

with committed zeal, he has become

a major figure in the Sydney alt music

scene, organising and conducting his

Loop Orchestra, as well as promoting

and supporting new music and outsider

art. Not only have his activities kept his

mental state together, he tells me that

his condition has actually been reversed

through his involvement with music.

Physical healing with music is notjust the

province of new agers?music can be as

practical as taking aspirin. When I met Scott Erichsen, he was 18

years old and studying jazz piano at the

Conservatorium of Music but, unlike

most of us, Scott carries with him a series

of sonic maps, each one of which is cer

tainly much more complex to memorize

than any tune, standard, or set of changes. For every journey Scott makes, no matter

how complex or trivial, long or short, he

relies on his ears to tell him where he is at

any given geographical point. His survival

sometimes depends on it. Scott has been

completely blind since he was 4 months

old. He has a knowledge of resonances or

sonic shadows that guides his every move.

Furthermore, these sonic maps, once

learnt, must be constantly upgraded as

objects and obstacles are moved in or out

of his regular journeys. He must be able

to hear the arrival of the unexpected and

react to that. Armed only with a stick, he

must be able to hear a world of total and

unremitting darkness.

Scott's perfect pitch helps in identify

ing the horn on his father's car, or any friend's car, from a dozen other similar

horns from a dozen other identical mod

els of car in the broadband noise of the

urban environment. "Oh, that must be

Steve, his car horn is an E^ major triad,"

he told me.

Again, I'm not suggesting that we all

have to be blind in order to create a

more musical society. But I am propos

ing that if we developed

even a fraction

of the sensitivity of Scott's oral skills, our

sonic environment would automatically

improve beyond recognition. Which takes us to the big outdoors.

There are good models in our recent

past, but these are fairly isolated events

when you consider that all music was

an outdoor affair (in Australia) up un

til 1788. I have already mentioned the

spectacularly successful Garma Festival

in North Eastern Arnhem Land.

Here's what Galarrwuy Yunupingu says about the festival:

... it's about learning from each other

the unique indigenous culture as well as the contemporary knowledge that we

learn from the white man's world. This

is about uniting people together and the

weighing and balancing of their knowl

edge.

How can we weigh and balance knowl

edge of music when only 23% of Aus

tralians get any kind of specialist music

instruction in our public schools? (Pri vate schools do much better, of course.)

It's not just that the standard of what

there is teeters from the bad to the abys

mal; it's the fact that music is just not

rated as a necessary life skill, not rated

in the same way that the notion of music

as a profession has become laughable.

Vast sums of money can be spent on the

bricks and mortar of opera houses and

conservatoriums, but no one wants to pay the musicians. The punters might pay for

celebrities, but they resent paying for the

real cost of live musicians, and by that, we

know what the value of music really is in

our society: rock bottom.

Here are some statistics taken in 2004

from the Music in Australia Knowledge Base [17]:

Out of a population of over 20.1 mil

lion people, only 230,800 persons said

they were involved as live performers of

music. That's a lot less than the number

of pianos in Australia in 1888 when the

population was well under three mil

lion.

So how unmusical have we become?

That figure, 230,000, includes unpaid and paid, hobbyists as well as

profession als. That's 1.47% of the population... and

I would suggest that is an exaggeration.

You know how people are... they want to

give a positive

answer to "Do you play mu

sic?" "Oh, yeah, I still play a bit of guitar

now and then."

Out of that 1.47%, 37.4% of music

performers worked less than 3 hours

per week, 47.4% worked 3 to less than 10

hours, and only 15.2% worked 10 hours

or more per week. That means that less

than 3,500 musicians were employed any

thing like full time in this country during the economic boom year of 2004.

What was their worth? There are no

figures, but of that initial boast of 230,800

people who said they had been involved

in music somehow, only 11,500 said they received more than $5,000 in that year.

And that number would be seriously

warped by the millions handed out to

opera and the five orchestras.

Anyway, tell that to the politicians and

lawyers who have put the noose of pub lic liability around the neck of anyone in Australia who tries to put on a

public




musical event outside the rigid confines

of an official controlled venue. In a place like Sydney, live music has been legislated to the edge of non-existence. The vibrant

pub culture of 20 and 30 years ago was

on the end of a vital live music history that started out as the "free and easies" of

the late 18th century, which became the

music halls, which became variety and

Vaudeville of the 19th century, which

spawned the Palais orchestras of the

early 20th century and the clubs of the

postwar era.

For a musical praxis in the future to

have any hope, it must involve a high level of reciprocity, the ability to socially combine on a local and global level. It

would have to be a catalyst that makes

us more human. This has dangers. At its

worst, music helps us wage war more ef

fectively; at best, it brings us into commu

nion with other selves, other species, the

natural world from whence we came. As

Aboriginal models can teach us, it should

be part of a continuum of creative prac tice involving sound, stories, and image,

something integrated and interchange able with geographical location. We

might be able to move from a position of musical impotence to one of strength if we chose to listen to the past. We are

in a unique position to learn from the

indigenous peoples of Australia. That

doesn't mean Nimbin hippie-style delu

sions of back to the bush; I'm proposing a society where there is, if not univer

sal musical suffrage as was the norm in

traditional societies, at least a situation

where if you want to share knowledge, as when a

Warlpiri women tells a sand

story, the most natural thing is to paint and sing this knowledge into existence.

Technology can be used well to pro mote such notions, but it cannot replace

original content, social connection, en

vironmental context, and the wonder of

firsthand experience, any more than we

can replace the earth on which we have

become uncontrollable parasites.

Digital technology could be an inter

face that links many human activities to

a direct musical expression. Imagine if

every time you witness a public encoun

ter such as shopping, sport, or even a

government debate, the content is trans

mitted through music, physically per formed music?visceral communication.

It is early days yet, but when the haptic feedback and kinaesthetic perceptions

experienced on traditional musical in

struments become possible through in

teractive technologies, we might be able

to incorporate electronic media with an

expressive physicality not yet possible. I'm

talking here of a direct interconnectivity to each other and to the physical world, as was practiced by traditional societies

for countless generations?the opposite of virtual reality.

?Jon Rose, Sydney, 2007

References

1. Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003) p. 8.

2. Clendinnen [1] p. 10.

3. Allan Marett, Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The

Wangga of North Australia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2005).

4. Wayne Grady, The Bone Museum (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000) p. 40.

5. Oscar Commetant (Judith Armstrong, trans.) in In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines (Adelaide:

Rigby, 1980) p. 178. It was first published as Au Pays des Kangourous et des Mines (Paris, 1890).

6. John Whiteoak, Playing Ad Lib (Sydney: Currency Press, 1999) p. 2.

7. Whiteoak [6] p. 47.

8. Whiteoak [6] p. 59.

9. The film Bungarun Orchestra, held by the Australian

Broadcasting Corporation, dates from 23 December 2001.

10. Unpublished papers from New Norcia, Western

Australia, Music at New Norcia: Historical Memoirs Part

3, Bishop Salvado, Benedictine Archives, p. 28.

11. Unpublished papers from New Norcia, Western

Australia, Music at New Norcia: New Norcia, chapter XI11, Father J. Flood, Benedictine Archives, p. 31.

12. Robin Ryan, "Aboriginal gumleaf bands," in John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, Currency Compan

ion to Music and Dance in Australia (Sydney: Currency House, 2003) p. 312.

13. See Percy Aldredge Grainger, "Free Music," Leonardo Music Journal 6 (1996). Document dated 6

December 1938, from the Archives of the Grainger Museum.

14. See Stephen Jones, "Philippa Cullen: Dancing the Music," Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004).

15. See <www.garma.telstra.com>.

16. See <www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib>.

17. The Music Council of Australia can be accessed at: <www.mca.org.au>.

www.jonroseweb.com features examples of work by the author over the last 35 years. He

is known worldwide as violinist, improviser,

composer, and instrument maker. The Rela

tive Violin Project and his use of interactive

electronics are considered exemplary. Jon Rose

started performing his environmental opus

fence music in Australia in 1983, and since

2002, he and his partner Hollis Taylor (also a violinist and composer) have traveled over

25,000 miles bowing fences?the conceit be

ing that the fifth continent is covered not with

millions of miles offences but with miles of musical string instruments (Fig. 4).

Hollis Taylor has written a travel book, Post

Impressions, documenting the project; it vis

its a number of themes and people surveyed in the above speech. The volume comes with

a DVD of filmed outback fence concerts, 88

stunning colour plates, and fence and bird

song transcriptions. In pursuit of their instru

ments, including the Rabbit-Proof Fence and

the 3,300-mile Dingo Fence, the duo survive

several hoggings, a

fly plague, a

flea infesta

tion, deadly snakes and crocodiles, heatstroke,

floods, storms, bush fires, and their own igno

rance. They engage with a

flying priest, an

auctioneer, an Aboriginal gumleaf virtuoso, the first camel transported piano to Alice

Springs, fence runners, and a singing dingo:

Like some wildlife, artists are edge-dwellers. They work on the fringe, the brink, and be

yond, refusing to take boundaries at their

fixed and unbreachable word, extravagantly

wandering off paths and overstepping orderly lines. But stretching, crossing, or breaking barriers is one thing as metaphor and quite another when you 're poking about the land,

physically experiencing the fence as stranger, outsider, and potential trouble maker. A fence serves as a moral boundary post; forgive us

our trespasses.

Post Impressions is available through www.

amazon.com, www.frogpeak.org and www.

hollistaylor. com.




Documents

Why Live? Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction || Listening to History: Some Proposals for Reclaiming the Practice of Live Music